Everyone hates PowerPoint (notwithstanding all the PPT consultants who proclaim is has cooler transitions and widgets than people know).

It doesn’t matter what PPT does. What matters is that we don’t like the outcome – the engorged dataset, the monotonous word-for-word reading of the presenter, the preference for data over learning / take-aways. We are inured to the build and rebuild of PPTs, taking last period’s content and updating it with NEW shiny content.

What we want from presentations are memories, when our internal hard drive is bombarded with increasing amounts of data and we outsource everything to google. We want inspiration, or entertainment at least.

So, we try different ways to capture the moment. We have:

• pecha kucha: 400 seconds of tight curation.
• TED Talk style: 16-18 minutes of insight, cool graphics, and a presenter who entertains and doesn’t read off the screen!
• Instavideo / Vine: 15 and 6-secs of how-tos and oh-snaps.
• Storifys that pull feeds together to tell a multi-dimensional / multi-participant tale

I have been practicing each of these. Now, I have two more examples. Yesterday I discussed the slowed-down presentation (for want of a better term) of a single idea; turning prose to presentation with evocative images.

Today, Nancy Duarte introduces me to Slidedocs, an adjunct idea of creating better, more shareable presentation-documents. Duarte describes it as: “a visual document, developed in presentation software, that is intended to be read and referenced instead of projected.”

Looking through the e-book, this seems doable: applied process, thinking about the audience, identifying the key learning, making it visual, making it stick. Not rocket science, but, as usual, there is work to do…

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